Thursday, 23 February 2017

Scrapbooking and Cake

As a teacher, I want to motivate and inspire my students. As a human being, I recognise that the best way to do that is often through the regular and copious application of cake. In fact, my students quite regularly request to bring cake to our lessons, and with some classes, a cake rota has been established so that once a week, one of us bakes something delicious and brings it along to help lubricate the learning process. I blogged about the story behind these particular ice cream cupcakes here, and while I cannot claim to have baked such impressively pretty confectionary, I really enjoyed eating them. And taking hope a couple of spares to photograph.

And eat.

This seemed like prime scrapbook material and is a nice way to get a little something about my life as a teacher into my albums.

I kept the design pretty simple, basing the structure around three blocks of equal size: one for a photo, one for the title, and one for journaling. I then added layers to each block to soften the design and make it less graphic. I picked out colours that complemented the photo in a range of shades, from pinks to beige, soft browns and woodgrains to creams and touches of grey. This is the kind of layering that my scraps are just made for!

I sketched out a title box and cut it out with a craft knife, and added my journaling onto graph paper. All the key elements of my page were in position and the next step was to add some detail.﻿

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I sketched out a pattern of interlocking clouds to be a big design feature of the page. I cut out my sketch to use as a template, traced round it onto patterned paper and set to with a craft knife. I enjoy making papercuts as I like that I end up with a unique embellishment to go on my pages. There's something enjoyable about taking the time to craft something that's so detailed.

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I cut out the clouds in a paper that I hoped would read as a neutral in the design. I find that busy patterns can be distracting if you're trying to cut them into intricate shapes, and so solids usually work better. I had initially thought I would use white but decided to go with a pale beige stripe in the end, shot through with occasional tones of pink, teal and yellow. I quite like the match, and it was interesting to move away from doing a papercut out of my usual white cardstock.﻿

I cut out some individual clouds to scatter around the page and create a sense of flow. As I was using my craft knife to cut out the middles, I ended up with solid, smaller cloud shapes which I thought were quite pretty and really showed the pattern on the paper. I decided to incorporate these into the layout too, just one or two, to showcase the pattern and add another texture. I added a little details around their edges with a pen to make them pop.﻿

There's not a lot of fancy embellishment here; mainly shapes punched from leftover bits and bobs and little icons cut from patterned paper such as tiny cameras or flowers. The finishing touch was to add wood veneer hearts scattered among the clouds; I like the way woodgrain fit so well with the colours.

I loved making this page, it flowed together quite naturally. As I was assembling the layered blocks, I tried different arrangements that I would like to try out. I'm looking forward to making more pages like this!

Kisses xxx

P.S. Please let it be the weekend soon. Please let there be some scrapbooking time.

You really mastered this art of intricate-shape-cutting!Beautiful page and lovely colour scheme.ps. I remember that story about baking, and I agree that a cup of tea with something nice once in a while makes lessons more interesting:)